Put away your purse & become debt-averse

foxgloves

Oh dear, CCL, that's not sounding ever so productive. Perhaps your afternoon will be better. Plasterer due to arrive in the next hour or so, then fireplace people tomorrow to finish off.......although we will need to arrange the final  cosmetic stuff, as the chimney breast will need a major re-wallpapering/painting after that. I have proven myself to be utterly incapable of wallpapering over the years, despite being good with my hands & a practical crafty-type person, so I think we will need to budget for that when we get a quote to have our stairwell/landing/hall properly redecorated. We both like painting but we can't get right up there & there will also be a very dodgy wall in the hall to prepare for plastering/papering once the builders have done a job outside to sort out damp ingress. Think as it is so grotty, I will budget for the extra expense & count it as an investment. I know that if we were selling the house now (we're not), the state of that wall would bring the price down. When we do eventually sell some years hence, we will need to get the absolute best price possible as we will probably be looking to relocate to a more expensive area. This means we have to work on the areas we have been ignoring for too long, partly because we didn't know how to go about them & partly because we didn't want to increase our mortgage. Ah well.......I shall keep a close eye on the Improvements budget & I won't do anything silly. By the way, wasn't that bathroom company cheeky pestering you to have a new kitchen as well! I like what you told them. I'd have told them exactly the same thing!
F x

foxgloves

Marionmgcars - I'd just use it to top a bowl of fresh strawberries, just on their own or sitting on top of a meringue nest.
F x

Narola1976

I really do enjoy your posts especially your trips down memory lane. It’s very inspiring. You really do sound like two different people. The change in your approach is like night and day. Did you do a diary back then, would love to read it. I love how productive you are, cooking, baking, craft, gardening. I feel quite in awe of you. Were you like that during the speedy decades as well?

crazy_cat_lady

foxgloves said:

Marionmgcars - I'd just use it to top a bowl of fresh strawberries, just on their own or sitting on top of a meringue nest.
F x

Oh - Eton Mess
But no good for my diet unfortunately. 
The bathroom company were brilliant foxgloves but I don't have ANY spare money at the moment and no matter how many times they ask me that isn't going to change so it just gets annoying that they keep nagging.

foxgloves

Narola76 - I didn't have an online-type diary but I have kept a journal on & off since 1994, as that was the year I moved out of rented accomodation & bought a house. I have always enjoyed writing, so decided to start a journal to document doing the house up, a spell in hospital & just generally my everyday comings & goings and thoughts. I have several volumes of these ramblings, which live in a storage box under the bed. I dip into them occasionally & my poor financial habits are often very plain to see......there will be an entry where I am writing about my worries re debt & big car bill or something or other coming up & I will decide to reign in the spending & reform myself. There follows a couple of days of stocking up the freezer with lentil spag bol, etc, then I seem to revert back to normal as soon as I see something I want to buy! It is so easy to see that pattern. I was definitely worried about my debts but failed to grasp that I was responsible for them because of my behaviour.
As for gardening, cooking from scratch, crafting, etc.....yes, I have always done these things. That's why I am baffled as to how my Spendy Decades lasted for so long. I am left-wing, huge on equalities, am into conservation, I learned to cook economically from scratch while I was at school in the 1970s/early 80s & have been growing things since I was about 8 years old. I have had sufficient skills for make-do & mend since my teens..........but somehow none of this, or my core beliefs got in the way of wasting money. I think one of the reasons I prefer my reformed attitudes so much is that I feel so much truer to my real self. Never too late to change, Narola.
F x
P.S My Spendy Years lasted from the age of 19 until well into my 40s. I paid off the last chunk of our debt at the age of 46 with my redundancy pay-out. Apart from borrowing some of the money needed to buy a new car since then (all of which was done sensibly i.e we saved a good deposit, did a part-ex, took out a small bank loan for the balance to keep the interest rates low & overpaid a substantial lump sum as soon as we were able to shorten the term of the loan......oh & we bought a pre-reg too, as it can save a wodge of money), we have not gone back to our endebted ways. It honestly would take the direst of emergencies for us to go that route again - it honestly does feel like another lifetime ago.

Sayschezza

foxgloves its the on line shopping that offers free postage if you spend over £50 that got me every time. The temptation to just buy something to make up the £50 to save what £3.50 was almost overwhelming even though the item you really really wanted was likely to be less than half that. Madness but it took me a long time to learn that lesson.

foxgloves

Oh, I know, Sayschezza, that is always a temptation, isn't it? And the online retailers know it!
F

Narola1976

Sayschezza said:

foxgloves its the on line shopping that offers free postage if you spend over £50 that got me every time. The temptation to just buy something to make up the £50 to save what £3.50 was almost overwhelming even though the item you really really wanted was likely to be less than half that. Madness but it took me a long time to learn that lesson.

Yes ! This! I am very guilty of it. Or the buy one get one half price. I nearly fell into that today. Want to get DD some pjs towards her 18th next week. She does need them but I only wanted to get one pair. But of course it’s the 2 shorts for £12 and buy 1 vest get another free. I had them in my basket (online) .... I stared at it, I stared at the cost, and thought, you know what, no, just no. I don’t even think it’s that nice. So I just left it. I will have to get some but it will be a considered purchase, not something I am taken in with the promise of a bargain. Once I removed 1 shorts and 1 vest the purchase lost its allure and I saw it for the rubbish it was.

foxgloves

Yes, Chrystal & Narola, We have to be more critical of what we're buying, don't we? It is definitely all too tempting to stick another £10 or £15 on an order to save £3.50 postage. We've all done it.
I think the decision re the PJs offer is interesting because it highlights how it is often the actual offer which is attracting us. Once the offer is stripped out of the equation, the item isn't always as nice as we thought it was. It's the thought that we were getting a special deal which attracted us. I once bought two strappy little vest tops to sleep in because they were on 'Buy 1, get 1 half price' which made them very cheap. The reality was that it would have been better value for me in that instance to buy one better item because those strappy vest-type tops were not at all equipped to deal adequately with the Foxgloves boobs. Jolly good job I only wore them in bed is all I can say! But the temptation was the offer. I do usually manage to look beyond the offer to the actual item these days, but these deals can still sometimes be a temptation, can't they?
F x

Sayschezza

And why do i get lured into the sales stuff. Its all the stuff nobody else wants so why do I.